NIR Responsive Drug Cocktail Using J‐Aggregates of Indocyanine Green Loaded Polydopamine Nanoparticles for Chemo‐Phototherapy of Cancer

Abstract

AbstractCo‐loading of drugs/dyes onto nanoparticles is a widely adapted strategy to achieve synergistic/combinatorial effects. However, one of the co‐loaded drugs may show dominant loading which reduces the loading efficiency of the other depending on the properties of the drug/dye loaded. Cisplatin (CDDP), a potent chemotherapeutic drug has very limited usage because of its poor aqueous solubility and systemic toxicity. A novel J‐aggregate is formulated using indocyanine green (ICG) and CDDP called the ICG J‐aggregate (IJA) which coordinates CDDP with ICG and enhances its water solubility resulting in higher loading. Further, polydopamine nanoparticles (PDA NPs) are used, which has shown excellent loading efficiency of IJA to form P‐IJA nano formulation. The results for the first time provide evidence of 2–4 folds increase in CDDP's loading in IJA formulation in comparison to loading of free CDDP under the same conditions. The overall P‐IJA formulation is capable of multi‐modal cancer therapy, i.e., chemotherapy, photothermal therapy, photodynamic therapy, and ferroptosis‐like selective cancer killing. The formulated P‐IJA is also found to be biocompatible, hemocompatible, and stable. The finding of the study suggests that P‐IJA can be effectively activated under NIR laser/pH as stimuli for deep‐tissue synergistic therapy.